Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Express Yourself: Fictional Characters Like Me

This week's question is:What book/character characters do you relate to the most?

I can see a bit of myself in a lot of fictional characters. I'll share a couple of them with you.

One is Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter series. I've always been a bit odd, and I tend to say strange things in the midst of otherwise serious conversations. She's a strong character who isn't afraid to be herself, even if that true self doesn't quite fit in with the world around her. Yet in the end she finds real friends who care for her the way she is, and that's a good lesson for anyone.

Another character I can relate to is Daria from the show of the same name. Daria Morgendorfer is a writer, she doesn't care about being fashionable and fitting in, she hangs with her artist friend Jane (everyone should have an artist friend!), and she looks at the world with a touch of cynicism (or maybe more than a touch). These are all qualities that I can very much see in myself, though I don't think I can pull off the monotone.

Since I chose Daria, I thought I would share this comedy sketch. Fake movie trailers can be great fun, but now I wish they really would make this movie!

My literary doppelganger is Matilda from the book Matilda by Roald Dahl. Matilda is a happy little smart girl in a really anti-intellectual family who has to learn how to outsmart them to survive and she does so with great humor and feeling. That book feels like it was written about my youth.

I would also go with Daria (in high school I even had two of the artsy and funny Jane type friends). Daria is cynical, sometimes meanspirited but posesses a great wealth of sensitivity which she balls up and hides underneath a blanket of cynacism. She is an outsider from her family and at school and much of her frustration comes from having high expectations of others (at least that's what her mother told her). Uhm yeah, the first time I saw Daria, I felt like someone took my teen years and drew it all up with a scrawny white girl in place of me.

Daria quote that actually summed up my teen years. "I'm so defensive that I actively work to make people dislike me so I don't have to feel bad when they do."